This photo taken on July 31, 2023, shows a view of Nairobi, capital of Kenya. (Xinhua/Wang Guansen)

Strolling through streets in the Kenyan capital of Nairobi, people are likely to observe a vibrant youth presence, especially on Sundays when the bustling city typically experiences a lull in foot traffic.

NAIROBI, Nov. 15 (Xinhua) — Strolling through streets in the Kenyan capital of Nairobi, people are likely to observe a vibrant youth presence, especially on Sundays when the bustling city typically experiences a lull in foot traffic.

A closer look at these lively gatherings reveals groups of people posing for photographs, choreographers devising dance routines, and TikTokers creating the latest TikTok trends.

Austine Oyugi, 24, and Awadh Salim, 26, who were setting up their photography gear for a photo shoot, demonstrated the enduring popularity of this timeless art among Kenya’s youth.

This dynamic duo has been engaged in street photography for nearly a year, following the challenges of securing employment after their university graduation in 2022.

 Hawkers sell their merchandise along a street in the central business district of Nairobi, capital of Kenya, on Oct. 26, 2023. (Photo by John Okoyo/Xinhua)

“After Governor of Nairobi Johnson Sakaja lifted the mandatory photography fee in late 2022, people began coming to the streets to take photos, and my friend and I joined in,” said Oyugi, who holds a degree in actuarial science. “Salim had a camera from campus, and both of us honed our skills by watching YouTube tutorials.”

Before Nairobi’s streets transformed into a photography haven for the youth, obtaining a photography and videography permit involved a cumbersome and costly process. It required obtaining a license from the Kenya Films and Classification Board at a cost of dozens of U.S. dollars, notifying the police, and making numerous visits to the local administrator’s office for a single day of shooting.

Some of these regulations are outdated, and the government of Nairobi has waived all business permits for freelance photographers and filmmakers in the city, said Sakaja when issuing the directive in September 2022, adding that additionally, all the daily shooting fees have been abolished.

Today, the two friends have acquired substantial equipment that has improved the quality of their work. On a good day, they can photograph up to 30 people, with each photo costing 0.65 dollars. The photos are immediately shared with clients via WhatsApp, making this their primary source of income.

Salim said he frequently approached passersby for impromptu photoshoots. He emphasized the importance of being convincing and effectively communicating with customers by showcasing their previous work to earn their trust.

On the other end of the street, young Kenyans are found to create and share videos on the popular social media app TikTok. Here, dozens of youngsters perform dance routines and record them using their smartphones.

Vehicles drive on the Nairobi Expressway in Nairobi, Kenya, Dec. 22, 2022. (Xinhua/Han Xu)

Janet Kyalo, a student majoring in tourism and management, seizes the opportunity to incorporate Nairobi’s skyscrapers as her TikTok background. She appreciates the clean streets and the architecture, which adds a unique touch to her videos.

Kyalo noted that many people have lost interest in studio videos, finding them repetitive. She and her friends typically convene from 2 p.m. onward and stay until 7 p.m. These sessions offer an excellent opportunity for networking and building connections that can be pivotal in their careers.

Cliff Dawiga, a 25-year-old who recently quit his job as a vehicle mechanic due to inadequate earnings, has been shooting for a little over two months. Fueled by his childhood passion for photography, he purchased a used camera with his savings and started capturing portraits.

“After hearing that the governor had removed limitations on creatives, I bought the camera. However, it stayed unused in my house for two months before I began using it,” Dawiga said. Building confidence, he began using it on the streets, capturing portraits from Tuesday to Sunday, with weekends being the busiest.

“The pay is decent, and we’re not harassed by county police, allowing us to work smoothly. On rare occasions, like when it rains, we face some inconveniences,” Dawiga noted.

With approximately 800,000 Kenyan youths entering the job market each year, according to the National Council for Population Report 2023, the available economic opportunities, both formal and informal, fall short of meeting their needs. In this context, emerging crafts such as street photography are likely to evolve into profitable ventures for the youthful demographic in the near future.  ■

Courtesy Laurel Museum

Courtesy Laurel Museum

Courtesy Laurel Museum

Courtesy Laurel Museum

Hear our full chat on my podcast “Beyond the Fame with Jason Fraley.”

She was famously the lead actress in “She’s Gotta Have It” (1986), which launched the career of Spike Lee.

Now, Tracy Camilla Johns, 60, presents her photography exhibit at the Laurel Museum, operated by the Laurel Historical Society in Maryland where she’s lived for 25 years. The exhibit runs now through Thanksgiving.

“This particular exhibit is specific to Laurel,” Johns told WTOP. “It’s kind of a quiet, kept secret that I have resided in the DMV for some time … The running joke is: ‘Where is that [photo location] in Laurel?’… There’s the lake, there’s a lot of local foliage … People come and go every day and don’t pay attention to the beauty … It’s a quiet little museum in a small part of the city, but it’s a treasure. I grew up in New York, so I’m a museum junkie.”

Born in 1963, Johns grew up in Hollis, Queens watching Broadway plays, drawing and listening to music.

“This is the 50th anniversary of hip-hop, so I grew up in the land of Salt-N-Pepa and Run DMC, I remember when rap started with the whole Queens influence,” Johns said. “I’m absolutely still a die-hard New Yorker, it never leaves you … I came from one of those wonderful African American families. Both of my parents were working and in school when I was growing up … When I declared I wanted to pursue art, they looked at me like I was crazy.”

She attended the Fashion Institute of Technology in Manhattan where she took a theater class as an elective. Her final project brought her teacher and classmates to tears. Less than a year later, she met NYU film graduate Spike Lee, who had just won the Student Academy Award for his thesis film “Joe’s Bed-Stuy Barbershop: We Cut Heads,” on which Ang Lee (“Life of Pi”) served as assistant director and Ernest Dickerson (“Juice”) was cinematographer.

“I assumed ‘Spike Lee’ was going to be a Caucasian guy in a leather jacket with studs on it — and he was anything but,” Johns said. “I was actually cast in another film that never came to fruition … called ‘Messenger’ about a bike messenger … I’d been cast as the female lead, but by the time we got to production, there was no film and I was actually quite distressed … But that started our friendship and he wrote ‘She’s Gotta Have It’ for me.”

Shot over 12 days in Brooklyn’s Fort Greene neighborhood on a shoestring budget of $175,000, “She’s Gotta Have It” marked Lee’s feature-film debut. Not only was it a groundbreaking moment for Black cinema, it also joined Jim Jarmusch’s “Stranger Than Paradise” (1984) to launch the American independent film movement of the 1980s.

“During the process of the film being edited, there were several screenings just to get [financial] backers to get the film completed,” Johns said. “This is where he coined the term ‘guerrilla filmmaking,’ because we were going from location to location, many that required permits and we had none. We had a lookout [person] and we would literally collapse the equipment and run to avoid the police.”

From a directorial standpoint, Lee had not yet invented his signature “double-dolly” shot — that would come later in “Mo’ Better Blues” (1990) and “Malcolm X” (1992) — but the film still features wild experimentation like breaking the fourth wall, fragmenting the narrative, even shifting from black-and-white to color for a dance sequence like the old dream ballets of “An American in Paris” (1951), right down to the gifting of a flower.

“My favorite scene from looking at it recently was the Thanksgiving scene,” Johns said. “That had a lot of different things going on in the angles and everything that we used, but overall, the film was so unique.”

As for her character, the lead role of Nola Darling was a fiercely polyamorous woman juggling three suitors: Jamie Overstreet (Tommy Redmond Hicks), Greer Childs (John Canada Terrell) and Mars Blackmon (Spike Lee). The character was also a muralist, echoing her real-life friendship with Brooklyn graffiti artist Jean-Michel Basquiat.

“Spike knew my illustration background when he created the movie, so some of those things were drawn from Tracy the person,” Johns said. “You had obviously the independence. The sexual liberation part was something that was definitely not seen in Black cinema at that point in time, it was absolutely groundbreaking, it was very controversial. There were thousands of responses and feedback about, ‘You’re showing me, my sister, my cousin.’”

The result won Lee the Award of Youth at the Cannes Film Festival, while Johns was nominated for Best Female Lead at the Independent Spirit Awards, losing to Isabella Rossellini in David Lynch’s “Blue Velvet” (1986).

“We’re in Cannes at the film festival, which was a total dream come true … talk about such a pinch-me moment,” Johns said. “Although he refutes this greatly, [Spike] said he knew, but even in that atmosphere, I had no idea that we were going to return home when it was going to be released, we had lines around the block for months, literally. It turned into this thing far greater than I had even wanted at that time, just the travel experience.”

Johns was suddenly in demand, appearing on TV’s “Family Ties” in 1987, starring in an Air Jordan commercial with Lee in 1988 and appearing in the music video for Tone Loc’s hip-hop hit “Wild Thing” (1988). Despite a cameo as a club patron in “Mo’ Better Blues” (1990), Spike’s career mostly continued without Johns in “School Daze” (1988), “Do the Right Thing” (1989), “Jungle Fever” (1991), “Malcom X” (1992) and “Crooklyn” (1994).

By the time she joined Wesley Snipes and Ice T in Mario Van Peebles’ “New Jack City” (1991), her personal life was careening out of control, plagued by drugs and alcohol to the point that she left the film industry in 1991.

“The auditions slowed down when you weren’t the flavor of the moment and the 15 minutes of fame had subsided,” Johns said. “I came to a crash and burn. I could not buy a job because I was young, I was a bit of a trash talker and I was doing a lot of excessive living … When I could not pay the rent any longer and all of the entourage had disappeared, I really and truthfully wanted to check out … Check out of this Earth, it literally was that severe.”

She describes these suicidal thoughts as the moment she hit rock bottom.

“Between the drugs, drinking and everything else I was doing excessively,” Johns said. “My personal items were in storage on the East Coast, I was in West Hollywood, sleeping on my then-manager’s floor, getting high just to not deal with life … I came into the apartment of a young lady [in] Compton, I went into that house with the full intent to not come out. It was there that I was literally crying, screaming, cussing God out … I was like, ‘Where are you?’”

That’s when she says she had a spiritual epiphany that transformed her into a born-again Christian.

“He showed up in that place,” Johns said. “I decided I was just going to climb out of it and, with the power of God, I did. Traveling, I did mission work in South America, the Philippines, I traveled with this amazing group of young people who came from similar backgrounds, from entertainment, from sports and they all had a common goal that they wanted to serve with their lives, they wanted to take what they had and use it for its greatest purpose.”

She even made amends with Lee, reprising her role as Nola Darling in “Red Hook Summer” (2012), but this time as an older Jehovah’s Witness. She reunited with Lee again for the 30th anniversary of “She’s Gotta Have It” in 2016, then appeared in the 2019 reboot TV series of “She’s Gotta Have It” on Netflix.

“I didn’t talk to him for almost a decade, we literally had lost contact because we were both very strong-willed and I was very much like, ‘I’m going to do what I want to do,’” Johns said. “Spike came to do a book signing about 18 to 20 years ago in [Prince George’s County] … He does this squint like, ‘Am I seeing something?’ He jumps out of his seat, pushes through the people and security … That’s when we came back into contact and made peace.”

Listen to the full conversation on the podcast below:

Dirty equipment can ruin your perfect shot. Keep appropriate cleaning supplies within reach so your phones and accessories are free of dust and ready for action.   

Once you’ve mastered the fundamentals of good photography and videography, affordable accessories  can help open up new artistic avenues. From stunning landscape photos to silky smooth action videos, you’ll be able to maximise your phone’s creative opportunities.  

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